Preface to the special issue on advances in continuous optimization on the occasion of EUROPT 2016

This special issue of MMOR contains carefully peer-reviewed papers presented at the 14th EUROPT Workshop on Advances in Continuous Optimization which was held on July 1–2, 2016, in Warsaw, organized by Andrzej Stachurski. The workshop is part of a series of annual events of EUROPT, the EURO working group on Continuous Optimization. EUROPT aims to promote and to facilitate communication links among researchers in continuous optimization. The EUROPT workshop in Warsaw was attended by 92 participants from 26 countries. The scientific program consisted of 20 contributed sessions, comprising 86 talks as well as four plenary talks by Andreas Griewank, Jiri Outrata, Anatoly Zhigljavsky, and the EUROPT fellow of the year 2016, Yaroslav Sergeyev. The focus of the present Special issue on advances in continuous optimization on the occasion of EUROPT 2016 is on continuous optimization theory, algorithms, software and applications. A brief overview of this special issue is as follows. H. Gfrerer and J.V. Outrata present a new sharp condition ensuring the Aubin property of solution maps to a class of parameterized variational systems. It requires computation of directional limiting coderivatives of the normal-cone mapping for the so-called critical directions. The respective formulas have the form of a second-order chain rule and extend the available calculus of directional limiting objects. F. Lara introduces a second-order asymptotic cone for the minimization problem of a noncoercive convex function in a reflexive Banach space. This provides the nec-